Ulysseus

Ulysses 1: Telemachus



     STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of
lather on  which a mirror and  a  razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown,
ungirdled, was sustained  gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held
the bowl aloft and intoned:
     - Introibo ad altare Dei.
     Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:
     - Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.
     Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced  about
and blessed  gravely thrice the  tower,  the  surrounding  country  and  the
awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus,  he bent towards
him and  made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his  throat  and shaking
his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top
of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed
him, equine in  its length, and at the light  untonsured hair,  grained  and
hued like pale oak.
     Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under  the  mirror and then covered the
bowl smartly.
     - Back to barracks, he said sternly.
     He added in a preacher's tone:
     - For this, O  dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine:  body and soul
and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A
little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.
     He peered sideways up  and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused
awhile in rapt  attention,  his even  white teeth glistening here and  there
with  gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through
the calm.
     - Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That  will do nicely.  Switch off
the current, will you?
     He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering
about his  legs the loose  folds of  his gown. The  plump  shadowed face and
sullen  oval jowl recalled  a prelate,  patron of arts in the middle ages. A
pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.
     - The mockery of it, he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek.
     He pointed his finger in  friendly jest and  went  over to the parapet,
laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed  him  wearily half
way and  sat down on the edge  of  the  gunrest,  watching him  still  as he
propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered
cheeks and neck.
     Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on.
     - My  name is absurd too: Malachi  Mulligan, two  dactyls. But it has a
Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the  buck himself. We must
go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?
     He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:
     - Will he come? The jejune jesuit.
     Ceasing, he began to shave with care.
     - Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.
     - Yes, my love?
     - How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?
     Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.
     - God, isn't he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks
you're not  a gentleman. God, these bloody English. Bursting  with money and
indigestion. Because  he comes from  Oxford. You know, Dedalus; you have the
real Oxford manner. He can't make  you out. O, my name  for you is the best:
Kinch, the knife-blade.
     He shaved warily over his chin.
     - He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is
his guncase?
     - A woful lunatic, Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?
     -  I  was, Stephen said with energy and growing  fear.  Out here in the
dark with a man I don't  know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a
black  panther.  You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however. If he
stays on here I am off.
     Buck Mulligan  frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped  down
from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.
     - Scutter, he cried thickly.
     He came over to the gunrest  and, thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper
pocket, said:
     - Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.
     Stephen suffered him to  pull out and hold up  on show  by its corner a
dirty  crumpled handkerchief. Buck  Mulligan  wiped the  razorblade  neatly.
Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said:
     - The bard's noserag. A new art colour for our  Irish poets: snotgreen.
You can almost taste it, can't you?
     He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair
oakpale hair stirring slightly.
     - God, he  said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet
mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah,
Dedalus, the Greeks. I  must teach  you. You must read them in the original.
Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.
     Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it  he looked
down on  the water  and  on  the  mailboat  clearing  the harbour  mouth  of
Kingstown.
     - Our mighty mother, Buck Mulligan said.
     He turned abruptly his  great searching eyes  from the sea to Stephen's
face.
     - The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't
let me have anything to do with you.
     - Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.
     -  You could have  knelt down,  damn it, Kinch,  when your dying mother
asked you,  Buck Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to think
of your mother begging you with her last  breath to kneel  down and pray for
her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you.
     He broke  off and  lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant
smile curled his lips.
     -  But  a lovely mummer,  he murmured to himself. Kinch, the  loveliest
mummer of them all.
     He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.
     Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against
his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain,
that was not yet the pain of  love, fretted his heart. Silently, in  a dream
she had  come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown
grave-clothes giving off an odour  of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had
bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of  wetted ashes. Across the
threadbare  cuffedge he  saw  the sea  hailed as a great sweet mother by the
well-fed voice  beside him.  The ring of bay and  skyline  held a dull green
mass of liquid. A  bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding
the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits
of loud groaning vomiting.
     Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.
     - Ah, poor dogsbody, he said in a  kind voice. I must  give you a shirt
and few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?
     - They fit well enough, Stephen answered.
     Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.
     - The mockery of it, he said contentedly, secondleg they should be. God
knows what  poxy  bowsy  left them off.  I  have a  lovely pair with  a hair
stripe, grey. You'll  look spiffing in them. I'm not joking, Kinch. You look
damn well when you're dressed.
     - Thanks, Stephen said. I can't wear them if they are grey.
     -  He can't  wear them,  Buck Mulligan told  his face  in  the  mirror.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
     He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers  felt the
smooth skin.
     Stephen turned his  gaze from the sea  and to  the plump face  with its
smokeblue mobile eyes.
     - That fellow I was with  in  the Ship last night, said  Buck Mulligan,
says you have  g.p.i.  He's up in Dottyville  with  Conolly  Norman. General
paralysis of the insane.
     He swept  the  mirror  a half  circle in the  air to  flash the tidings
abroad in sunlight now radiant  on the sea. His curling shaven lips  laughed
and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his  strong
wellknit trunk.
     - Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard.
     Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by
a crooked  crack, hair on end. As  he and others see me. Who chose this face
for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.
     -  I pinched it  out  of the skivvy's room, Buck Mulligan said. It does
her all right. The aunt  always keeps  plain-looking  servants  for Malachi.
Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.
     Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes.
     -  The rage of Caliban at not  seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If
Wilde were only alive to see you.
     Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:
     -  It is a  symbol of  Irish art. The  cracked  lookingglass of a  Buck
Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with  him round the
tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them.
     - It's not fair  to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said  kindly.
God knows you have more spirit than any of them.
     Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The
cold steelpen.
     -  Cracked  lookingglass of  a  servant.  Tell that  to  the  oxy  chap
downstairs and touch him  for a guinea. He's stinking with money and  thinks
you're  not  a gentleman. His  old fellow made  his  tin by selling jalap to
Zulus  or some bloody swindle or other.  God, Kinch, if you and I could only
work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it.
     Cranly's arm. His arm.
     - And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I'm the only one
that knows what you are. Why don't you trust me more? What have you  up your
nose against me? Is it Haines?  If he makes any noise here I'll  bring  down
Seymour and we'll give him a ragging worse than they gave Clive Kempthorpe.
     Young shouts  of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe's rooms. Palefaces:
they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another, O, I shall expire!
Break the news to her gently, Aubrey!  I shall die! With slit ribbons of his
shirt whipping  the air he hops and hobbles  round  the table, with trousers
down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the tailor's shears. A scared
calf's face gilded with marmalade.  I don't want  to be debagged!  Don't you
play the giddy ox with me!
     Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf
gardener,  aproned, masked with  Matthew Arnold's face, pushes  his mower on
the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.
     To ourselves... new paganism... omphalos.
     - Let him  stay, Stephen said. There's nothing wrong with him except at
night.
     - Then what is  it? Buck Mulligan asked  impatiently. Cough  it up. I'm
quite frank with you. What have you against me now?
     They halted, looking  towards  the blunt cape of Bray Head  that lay on
the water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly.
     - Do you wish me to tell you? he asked.
     - Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don't remember anything.
     He looked in Stephen's face as  he spoke. A light wind passed his brow,
fanning softly  his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety
in his eyes.
     Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said:
     - Do you remember the first day I went  to your house after my mother's
death?
     Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:
     - What?  Where? I  can't  remember anything. I remember only ideas  and
sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?
     - You were making  tea, Stephen said, and I went across the landing  to
get  more  hot  water.  Your  mother  and  some  visitor  came  out  of  the
drawingroom. She asked you who was in your room.
     - Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget.
     -  You said, Stephen answered,  O, it's only  Dedalus whose  mother  is
beastly dead.
     A  flush which  made him  seem  younger and more engaging  rose to Buck
Mulligan's cheek.
     - Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that?
     He shook his constraint from him nervously.
     -  And what is death, he asked, your  mother's  or yours or my own? You
saw  only your  mother die. I see  them pop  off every day in the  Mater and
Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissecting room. It's a beastly thing
and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter.  You wouldn't kneel down to pray
for your mother on her  deathbed when  she asked you. Why?  Because you have
the  cursed jesuit strain  in you, only it's  injected the wrong way. To  me
it's all a mockery and beastly.  Her cerebral lobes are not functioning. She
calls the doctor Sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the quilt. Humour
her till it's over. You crossed her last wish in death and yet you sulk with
me  because I don't whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette's. Absurd!  I
suppose I did say it. I didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother.
     He  had spoken himself into boldness.  Stephen,  shielding  the  gaping
wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly:
     - I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.
     - Of what, then? Buck Mulligan asked.
     - Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.
     Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.
     - O, an impossible person! he exclaimed.
     He walked off quickly round the  parapet.  Stephen  stood at  his post,
gazing  over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea  and  headland  now grew
dim. Pulses  were  beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt the
fever of his cheeks.
     A voice within the tower called loudly:
     - Are you up there, Mulligan?
     - I'm coming, Buck Mulligan answered.
     He turned towards Stephen and said:
     - Look  at  the sea. What  does it care  about offences?  Chuck Loyola,
Kinch, and come on down. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers.
     His head  halted again for a moment at the top  of the staircase, level
with the roof.
     - Don't mope  over it all day, he said. I'm inconsequent. Give  up  the
moody brooding.
     His head vanished  but the drone  of his descending voice boomed out of
the stairhead:
     And no more turn aside and brood
     Upon love's bitter mystery
     For Fergus rules the brazen cars.
     Woodshadows floated  silently  by through  the morning peace  from  the
stairhead  seaward  where he gazed. Inshore and farther  out  the  mirror of
water whitened, spurned by  lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim
sea. The  twining  stresses,  two  by two. A hand plucking  the  harpstrings
merging  their twining  chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim
tide.
     A cloud began  to cover  the  sun slowly,  shadowing the  bay in deeper
green. It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter  waters. Fergus'  song: I sang it
alone in  the house, holding  down the long  dark chords. Her door was open:
she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside.
She  was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love's bitter
mystery.
     Where now?
     Her  secrets:  old feather fans,  tasselled  dancecards,  powdered with
musk,  a  gaud of  amber beads in her locked  drawer. A birdcage hung in the
sunny window of her house when  she  was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in
the pantomime of Turko the terrible and laughed with others when he sang:
     I am the boy
     That can enjoy
     Invisibility.
     Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.
     And no more turn aside and brood
     Folded away in the memory of nature with her  toys. Memories  beset his
brooding  brain.  Her  glass of water  from the  kitchen  tap  when she  had
approached the sacrament. A  cored apple, filled  with brown sugar, roasting
for  her at  the  hob  on a  dark  autumn  evening. Her shapely  fingernails
reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's shirts.
     In a dream, silently, she  had  come to him, her wasted body within its
loose graveclothes giving  off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath bent
over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.
     Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to  shake and  bend my soul. On
me alone. The ghostcandle to light her  agony. Ghostly light on the tortured
face. Her  hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while  all prayed on their
knees. Her eyes on me to  strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum
turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.
     Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!
     No mother. Let me be and let me live.
     - Kinch ahoy!
     Buck Mulligan's voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the
staircase, calling again. Stephen, still  trembling at his soul's cry, heard
warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words.
     - Dedalus,  comedown, like  a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is
apologizing for waking us last night. It's all right.
     - I'm coming, Stephen said, turning.
     - Do, for Jesus'  sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our
sakes.
     His head disappeared and reappeared.
     - I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it's  very clever. Touch
him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.
     - I get paid this morning, Stephen said.
     - The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one.
     - If you want it, Stephen said.
     - Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We'll have
a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent sovereigns.
     He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of
tune with a Cockney accent:
     O, won't we have a merry time
     Drinking whisky, beer and wine,
     On coronation,
     Coronation day?
     O, won't we have a merry time
     On coronation day?
     Warm sunshine  merrying  over the  sea. The  nickel shaving-bowl shone,
forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there all
day, forgotten friendship?
     He went over to it, held it in  his hands awhile, feeling its coolness,
smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the  brush was stuck. So I
carried the boat of  incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and yet the
same. A servant too. A server of a servant.
     In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan's gowned form
moved  briskly about the hearth to and fro, hiding and revealing  its yellow
glow.  Two shafts of  soft  daylight fell across the flagged floor  from the
high  barbicans:  and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of coalsmoke  and
fumes of fried grease floated, turning.
     - We'll be choked, Buck  Mulligan said. Haines,  open  that  door, will
you?
     Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the
hammock where  it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open  the
inner doors.
     - Have you the key? a voice asked.
     - Dedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey Mack, I'm choked. He howled
without looking up from the fire:
     - Kinch!
     - It's in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward.
     The key scraped round  harshly twice and, when the heavy  door had been
set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the doorway,
looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to  the table and  sat down to
wait. Buck  Mulligan  tossed the  fry on to  the dish  beside  him. Then  he
carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set them down heavily
and sighed with relief.
     - I'm melting, he said, as the candle remarked when .
     But  hush. Not  a word  more  on that subject. Kinch,  wake up.  Bread,
butter, honey. Haines, come in.  The grub is ready. Bless us,  O  Lord,  and
these thy gifts. Where's the sugar? O, jay, there's no milk.
     Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from
the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet.
     - What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come after eight.
     - We can drink it black, Stephen said. There's a lemon in the locker.
     - O, damn you and your Paris fads, Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove
milk.
     Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly:
     - That woman is coming up with the milk.
     - The blessings of God on you, Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his
chair. Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar  is in  the bag. Here,  I
can't go fumbling at the damned eggs.  He hacked through the fry on the dish
and slapped it out on three plates, saying:
     - In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.
     Haines sat down to pour out the tea.
     - I'm giving you  two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do
make strong tea, don't you?
     Buck Mulligan, hewing  thick  slices  from  the loaf, said  in  an  old
woman's wheedling voice:
     -  When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And  when I
makes water I makes water.
     - By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.
     Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling:
     -  So  I do, Mrs Cahill, says  she. Begob, ma'am,  says Mrs Cahill, God
send you don't make them in the one pot.
     He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled
on his knife.
     -  That's  folk, he said  very earnestly,  for your  book, Haines. Five
lines of  text and ten  pages  of notes about the folk and  the  fishgods of
Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.
     He turned to  Stephen  and asked  in a fine  puzzled voice, lifting his
brows:
     - Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan's tea  and water pot spoken
of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?
     - I doubt it, said Stephen gravely.
     - Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray?
     -  I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did  not exist in or out of  the
Mabinogion. Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann.
     Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight.
     - Charming, he  said in a finical sweet voice,  showing his white teeth
and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming.
     Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened
rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf:
     - For old Mary Ann
     She doesn't care a damn,
     But, hising up her petticoats...
     He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned.
     The doorway was darkened by an entering form.
     - The milk, sir.
     - Come in, ma'am, Mulligan said. Kinch, get the jug.
     An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen's elbow.
     - That's a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God.
     - To whom? Mulligan said, glancing  at her.  Ah,  to  be sure.  Stephen
reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.
     - The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently  of
the collector of prepuces.
     - How much, sir? asked the old woman.
     - A quart, Stephen said.
     He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white
milk,  not  hers.  Old shrunken  paps. She poured again  a measureful and  a
tilly.  Old  and  secret  she had  entered  from a  morning world,  maybe  a
messenger.  She praised the goodness  of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching
by a  patient cow at  daybreak in the lush field.